HELP - LOST FILE!!

[rplumpton]

A very basic question I know, but new to the world of Macs!
Have inadvertently saved over a file in excel using 'save as' so have
now lost the original spreadsheet.
Can anyone advise how to recover the original file?
Working on new Imac and on Excel 2004 for Mac - and whilst have used
excel spreadsheets a lot, have not done so on Macs.
Any help much appreciated (& desperately needed!!)
Thanks

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi

In general (Mac and PC) you would Save As to save the file with a *new*
name. However if you save the file with the same name and when prompted
about whether or not you want to replace the existing file you choose the
Replace option, then the original file is overwritten.

It's entirely possible that some or all of the original file is located in
bits a pieces on your hard drive. A lot of time and money would be required
to find them and put them back together.

Have you searched your hard drive for files that might be older using file
names that you may have used in the past? Maybe you have an old copy
somewhere you've forgotten about? To look, from the desktop use Apple+F from
the keyboard.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

A very basic question I know, but new to the world of Macs!
Have inadvertently saved over a file in excel using 'save as' so have
now lost the original spreadsheet.
Can anyone advise how to recover the original file?
Working on new Imac and on Excel 2004 for Mac - and whilst have used
excel spreadsheets a lot, have not done so on Macs.
Any help much appreciated (& desperately needed!!)
Thanks

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
MVP info

 

[The Wolf]

May I suggest that you purchase Retrospect and set it up to automatically
back up each day, say at 10 pm?

You can back up to your internal hard drive or better yet an external
Firewire drive.

That way if you do this again (we all have) you can simply restore from your
back up.